This list combines two of my favourite things: literature and food, from Diana Secker Tesdell, who compiled an anthology called Stories from the Kitchen. She finds that the most memorable were those that were not just about the food. "In literature, meals are often an occasion for transcendence. While researching my anthology, Stories from the …
Continue reading The Guardian Lists Top 10 Memorable Meals in Literature
You will enjoy this paean to books by Julian Barnes: discovering the vast worlds that reading can open up, and the joy of owning books. "I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through …
Continue reading My Life as a Bibliophile: Julian Barnes in The Guardian
Ann Morgan considered herself well read — until she discovered the "massive blindspot" on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of English and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the English-speaking world. So she set an ambitious goal: to read one book from every country in the world over the course of a …
As those of you who continue to buy paper books know, there is a point you reach where you run out of space to store them. My husband and I are both holdouts against electronic books. But that comes at a price. Our bookshelves (all 12 of them!) are so packed that there isn’t the …
Simon Schama writes eloquently about libraries, at a time when they seem to be under threat. When I was a child, I was left one afternoon a week at the British Council library. It was the highlight of my week, and the smell of a library still evokes hours of contented browsing and reading. And …
Continue reading Simon Schama on the London Library: Financial Times
Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh international book festival, complained that British "parochial" reading habits were "something of an embarrassment". In response, Alison Flood, former news editor at The Bookseller, came up with a list of her 10 favourite novels in translation. However, it does look like Barley was wrong—according to The Guardian, translated fiction is …
Translated from Italian by Ann GoldsteinPublished by Alfred A. Knopf, 2016, 233 pages. Original version published in 2016.Review by Imran Ali Khan In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri is a beautiful read that explores the relationship between a writer, language and the nature of the self. The book explores the writer's relationship with Italian, a …
As readers in the English-speaking world debate about the merits of fiction over non-fiction, this distinction does not even exist in several cultures. In this article from The Guardian's website, Richard Lea writes about how Bosnian, Arabic, Gikuyu and other languages label (or don't label) genres. "There’s a mighty canyon that runs down the middle …
Continue reading Fiction v Nonfiction – English Literature’s Made-Up Divide (from The Guardian)
An interesting article on the ongoing and seemingly endless debate on the merits of paper books and ebooks. Personally, I'm very much a paper book person and don't even own a Kindle. But I did enjoy this article on the joys of ebooks--and modern information technology--and thought I'd share it. "We’ve all heard it said that …
Continue reading The Intangibility of Books: The Digital Bibliophile, by Eric Burns-White
This article by Gail Rebuck is really preaching to the converted as far as this blog is concerned—if you're reading this, then you do not need to be told that reading is not only a pleasure but it's also good for you. But it made some important points, and I thought it was worth sharing. …
Continue reading Humans Have the Need to Read: Gail Rebuck (from the Guardian)
Talking About Books 